The wealth of exoplanets and the architectures of planetary systems that continue to emerge, is astounding and raises questions about the general picture of planet formation and evolution. To achieve such a stage of understanding, continuing studies of planetary systems in various stellar environments are essential. At present, of about 900 known

Dust around active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is distributed over a wide range of spatial scales and can be observed in the infrared (IR). It is generally assumed that the distribution on parsec scales forms a geometrically and optically thick entity in the equatorial plane around the accretion disk and broad-line region—dubbed "dust torus"—that emits

Context. Temperature, surface gravity, and metallicitity are basic stellar atmospheric parameters necessary to characterize a star. There are several methods to derive these parameters and a comparison of their results often shows considerable discrepancies, even in the restricted group of solar-type FGK dwarfs. Aims: We want to check the

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The fraction of ionized gas in the warm-hot intergalactic medium induces temperature anisotropies on the cosmic microwave background similar to those of clusters of galaxies. The Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) anisotropies due to these low-density, weakly non-linear, baryon filaments cannot be distinguished from that of clusters using frequency

The Chromospheric Lyman-Alpha Spectro-Polarimeter (CLASP) is a VUV spectropolarimeter optimized for measuring the linear polarization of the Lyman-alpha line (121.6 nm). The Lyman-alpha line is predicted to show linear polarization caused by atomic scattering in the chromosphere and modified by the magnetic field through the Hanle effect. The Hanle